Bodily Harm (23 page)

“Two weeks,” Sloane said. “We’d like to depose certain individuals and would request that defendant agree to produce its witnesses on shortened notice.”

“We have no objection,” Reid said, “so long as plaintiffs agree to the same.”

“I will put it in the order that the two sides are to cooperate. If you don’t, you’ll feel it in your wallets.”

Rudolph made some handwritten notations, signed the document on his desk, and handed it down to his clerk in the well, who handed it to Reid.

“I’ll see you all back here in two weeks,” Rudolph said.

CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN
PHOENIX, ARIZONA

MAXINE BOLELLI PUSHED on, her tanned legs pumping like pistons up the mountain, her back and stomach glistening. The robin’s-egg blue bandana wrapped around her head dripped sweat, turning it navy blue. She wore a matching sports bra and shorts. Bolelli loved to prove people wrong. So anyone who
assumed from her plumpish figure that she was out of shape was in for a rude awakening. She liked nothing better than to walk onto a racquetball court looking like the big girl who didn’t know which end of the racquet to hold and proceed to kick the crap out of some unsuspecting foe.

“So we have a name, Metamorphis,” she said, her breathing only slightly labored despite an increase in the incline. “I like it.”

“Kendall must be really concerned to have filed for a TRO,” said Galaxy’s president, Brandon Craft, his breathing strained as he spoke.

Craft was just a shade taller than Bolelli but a good twenty pounds overweight and clearly struggling. Bolelli had no sympathy for him. Lazy, Craft was not a hiker, or a walker for that matter. Had there been a moving sidewalk from the parking lot to the front of the building he would have taken it. It disgusted Bolelli. Still, Craft was doing better than Elizabeth Meyers. Galaxy’s chief financial officer lagged three yards behind them, and the last time Bolelli checked, Meyers looked like an overripe tomato about to explode. The rest of Galaxy’s executive team trudged along, some with heads bowed, as if on a death march, either struggling to keep up, or smart enough to realize they shouldn’t pass their bosses.

A few years back a board member suggested that Galaxy hold “team-building retreats” to promote morale and foster an attitude of sharing and cooperation among the various departments. Other board members, thinking it a splendid idea, quickly approved the suggestion. What a crock of bullshit. Bolelli knew there would be no sharing among departments because everyone was too busy kissing her ass in search of the next promotion. What the board members really wanted was a boondoggle at the shareholders’ expense. The word
retreat
conjured images of expensive hotels in exotic locales with golf courses, five-star
restaurants, spas, and everyone sitting around the pool sipping mai tais and piña coladas while some team leader spewed psychobabble bullshit and asked everyone, “How do you feel about that?”

Ka-ching!

Lest anyone think Bolelli wasn’t sympathetic to their wants and needs, she came up with her own morale-building retreats. She asked her administrative assistant to pick various spots around the Phoenix area for exercise. In the hotter months she moved the “retreats” indoors for racquetball tournaments and squash. Since today the weather was a balmy 102 degrees, she had taken everyone to Camelback Mountain. The hike was known to be arduous and had a reputation of leaving inexperienced hikers in positions where they had to be rescued. Still, no one had bowed out. No one dared.

“They don’t want any information about the design becoming public,” she said. “Can we get the pleadings?”

“Already have,” Craft gasped. He used a water bottle to spray his face. “The pleadings are online. Nothing of use, though. The complaint is vague.”

“What about the TRO papers?”

“They’ve been sealed by the court at Kendall’s request.”

“What about the theory that the toy could be dangerous?”

“Again, vague. No specifics.”

“Give me the details,” Bolelli said.

Craft took several deep breaths. “It indicates the children had siblings in a Kendall focus group. Kendall denies any liability. They say it’s a publicity stunt to force a settlement.”

“Can we get the names of the other children in the groups, talk to their parents?”

“Santoro doesn’t have it. He says Fitzgerald must have it under lock and key. The parents of the children named in the lawsuit declined to talk to us.”

“Keep an eye on it.” Bolelli dug in for the final incline before the summit.

“What about the stock?” Craft asked.

“What about it? Fitzgerald is no dummy. He wouldn’t be wasting his time filing a TRO unless he knew he was sitting on something huge, something that has never been done before. This just confirms everything we’ve already learned. Buy it.”

“Our cash reserves are taking a hit.”

“Sometimes you have to pay to play,” she said, “and I intend to play.”

At the summit, Bolelli stood king of the mountain. She sucked the warm desert air through her nostrils, feeling it burn, then wasted no time before beginning her march down the hill even before the others had reached the top.

“We’re moving, people,” she barked.

ONE UNION SQUARE BUILDING
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

FOLLOWING THE HEARING, Sloane returned to his office and debriefed the McFarlands and Gallegoses in a conference room. Despite their demographic and socioeconomic differences, the two families had been bonded by one shared horrific experience. He sent the McFarlands home and the Gallegoses to a room at the Athletic Club so they would not have to travel back and forth to Mossylog each night. Manny’s cousin would watch their children. Then Sloane returned to his office to see what fires burned.

Carolyn greeted him with a grim expression and handed him a document. “We were just served,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

The motion on behalf of Bill and Terri Larsen and Frank
Carter sought a temporary restraining order from San Francisco Superior Court prohibiting Sloane from coming within a hundred yards of the Larsens, Frank Carter, or Jake. Attached to the pleading was a declaration from Bill Larsen providing vivid details of Sloane’s “assault” on Frank Carter. Bill Larsen also said Sloane had been menacing toward him and his wife in the meeting, and that he believed Sloane was mentally unbalanced and unfit in his present condition to care for Jake. Conspicuously missing was a declaration from Frank Carter, which Sloane found to be of particular interest. The motion sought a date for a hearing to determine custody of Jake.

Sloane had no intention of physically confronting the Larsens, or Frank, and, practically, he couldn’t get to Jake either. What he did care about was the custody hearing.

“The hearing is in San Francisco Superior Court tomorrow,” Carolyn said. “The judge’s clerk said the custody hearing has not yet been set.”

“Where’s Tom?”

“In his office.”

Pendergrass sat at his desk. Sloane handed him the papers.

“I saw them earlier,” Pendergrass said. “How do you want to handle it?”

“File a pleading stating I have no objection to implementation of the temporary restraining order, but that I will contest custody and wish to be present and put on evidence. Ask to appear at the TRO hearing tomorrow telephonically. Make it clear, Tom. I want the court to know that I will contest custody, and I want Tina’s parents to know that I have no intention of giving up Jake.”

“I understand,” Pendergrass said.

As soon as Sloane stepped into the hallway Carolyn barked at him again. “David, Barclay Reid is on the phone.”

constitution gardens washington, d.c.

CHARLES JENKINS WALKED the dirt and gravel path beneath the canopy of oak, maple, and dogwood trees parallel to the Reflecting Pool that stretched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. The leaves showed early signs of fall, faint hints of what would become the glorious reds, oranges, and yellows. A few had fallen, scattered by government employees passing him in business attire and tourists strolling the paths. Three men and a woman jogged past, their running shoes crunching the gravel beneath their feet in pounding unison.

Jenkins paused at the Lincoln Memorial before following a path to the bronze sculpture of three young men dressed in jungle attire and carrying weapons. Their faces were unknown to him, and yet so familiar; they could have been any of the men with whom he had served. The artist had been racially sensitive, but their varied ethnicities—white, black, and Hispanic—were of no matter. Nam was color-blind. So were the Vietcong bullets.

Jenkins continued down the path to the vertex of the black wall and the first name carved in stone. The dead were inscribed not in alphabetical but in chronological order, by date of their deaths. As the wall rose from the ground like a huge tombstone, he soon was running his fingers along thousands and thousands of the etched letters. The immensity and length of the granite, and the sheer number of names it held, overwhelmed him. Jenkins had never even seen pictures of the memorial in a magazine or newspaper. He’d avoided reading anything about Nam. He now realized that in so doing, he had abandoned these men, these brothers, while for thirty years he hid on Camano Island not to live, but to die. He’d been wrong. He’d been so wrong. What
would each of the men and their families give to have been in his shoes, to have left the jungle alive, to be standing here at this moment, staring at someone else’s name? He thought of the years he had served, and the names of the men, and he was tempted to look for them but knew that finding them now, thirty years removed, would only bring him back to a place he did not want to go.

“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Curley Wade stood to Jenkins’s immediate right but facing the wall. Jenkins had not heard or seen him approach. “No matter how many times I come here it never gets any easier.” Wade faced Jenkins. “But I come. I walk this way every chance I get—so I don’t forget. I’ve heard that the graveyard in Normandy is like this, the magnitude of the sacrifice almost too immense to comprehend. I get a kick out of those people who say we live free. They need to come here and see this.”

Jenkins followed Wade to the end of the wall and eventually down a path with black metal park benches. The early evening sky revealed the faint hint of a half moon, and the temperature had cooled, though it remained humid. They sat opposite the women’s memorial, and as Wade opened a satchel, Jenkins watched a gray squirrel claw its way down a tree trunk, seeming to defy the laws of gravity. A breeze scattered leaves on the ground and rustled the branches. Overhead he heard the engines of a plane and behind them the rush of traffic on Constitution Avenue.

Wade removed a plain white envelope, handing it to him. “It isn’t much.”

Jenkins opened the flap and pulled out a grainy photograph of a man in a long black coat and slacks. The photograph had been taken with a telephoto lens, but the features of the man’s face were clear enough that Jenkins could confirm it to be the same man in the photograph he had provided Wade. Judging from the other men and women in the photograph, and knowing that the
average male was just over five nine and the average female just under five four, Jenkins estimated the man to be several inches over six feet.

The next photo was a blowup of the first. The man wore his hair combed back off his forehead in a ponytail.

“Arab?” Jenkins asked.

“American.” Wade nodded to the envelope. Jenkins pulled out the remaining photograph. It depicted a group of men dressed in desert cammies holding automatic weapons. Perspiration had caused their face paint to smudge, a black and beige mask that made the whites of their eyes bulge at the camera.

Wade pointed to the third man from the right. “Anthony Stenopolis.”

Jenkins had a name.

He studied the photograph more closely, his interest no longer the face but the uniform. He saw no patches on the fatigues: no American flags, no insignias. He saw no dog tags or even chains wrapped around the men’s necks. In Vietnam there had been missions where men like Major Davidson showed up and Jenkins’s squad was instructed to remove everything that could in any way associate them with the United States. That meant no cigarettes, no chewing gum, no dog tags, no flags, no insignias of any kind. Nothing. These excursions usually took them into Cambodia, though no one ever said so, and no records of the missions existed. When Jenkins later joined the Agency he learned that the missions were referred to as “counterinsurgency.” In Nam, the men had called them something else: suicide runs.

“Very early after nine-eleven, U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of operations that enabled them to locate and target key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency, and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups,” Wade said. “The operations relied upon some of the most highly classified information in the U.S. government.”

“What’s his background?”

“Parents immigrated from Greece. He enlisted in the army and was identified as a candidate for further training. Apparently he showed a propensity for learning foreign languages—Spanish, Portuguese, German, French—and was assigned to the Defense Language Institute. He later served during Desert Storm. Honorably discharged and went to work for a private security contractor in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa.”

“And we brought him back after nine-eleven.”

Wade nodded. “He also speaks Farsi and several other Arab dialects.”

Jenkins knew that this skill would have made Stenopolis a valuable asset. “Then what?”

Wade shrugged. “Based on what you’ve told me, he apparently went out on his own.”

Jenkins reconsidered the blowup of the man’s face. “If he’s independent, there has to be a way for people to get in contact with him.”

“This is where it gets tricky.”

Jenkins waited.

“There’s a name on a card in the file, someone who might know how to contact him but who won’t be eager to talk to you about it.”

Jenkins did not recognize the name on the card, but he knew why the man would be reluctant to discuss any association with someone like Stenopolis. “I appreciate it, Curley,” he said. Then he asked the question that had been on his mind since he saw the photo of Stenopolis in uniform.